NCP-MCA case studies
NCP-MCA · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The Nutanix Certified Professional – Multicloud Automation (NCP-MCA) is a professional-level certification for administrators, cloud engineers, and automation specialists who build and operate automated workflows across Nutanix environments and hybrid cloud infrastructure. It validates practical skill with Prism Central automation constructs: playbooks that react to alerts and events, self-service blueprints and application lifecycle management in Calm, runbooks for repeatable operational tasks, and the scripting and API integration layer that ties these together. The NCP-MCA case studies are 5 cases and about 3,604 words.
1Choosing the Right Automation Layer for a Mixed Operations Backlog
A platform team manages 140 VMs across two Prism Elements registered to one Prism Central. They have three recurring needs: (1) when Prism Central raises a 'VM disk capacity high' alert, add 20 GB to the affected VM and notify the owner; (2) every Friday at 22:00, power off all VMs in a non-production category tag and start them Monday at 06:00; (3) provision a three-tier internal app with a fixed network profile, including approval before production.
749 words, about 4 min2A Remediation Playbook That Keeps Re-Firing
An administrator creates a Playbook in Prism Central to remediate a 'Memory usage high' alert on 18 VMs in a production project. The trigger is the built-in alert; the actions are: add 4 GB memory, reboot the VM, and post a message to a team chat webhook.
707 words, about 4 min3Blueprint Deployment Blocked by a Quota That Does Not Match the Math
A Calm project 'Payments-Dev' has a quota of 20 vCPUs and 48 GB memory. A blueprint has two app profiles: 'dev' deploys one 4-vCPU/16-GB web VM and one 4-vCPU/16-GB DB VM; 'prod' deploys three web VMs and one DB VM, each 4 vCPU/16 GB.
694 words, about 3 min4A Monthly Snapshot Cleanup Runbook That Cannot Finish in Its Window
A runbook runs on the first day of each month at 01:00 to snapshot 240 VMs and delete snapshots older than 30 days. It is built as a single serial sequence: for each VM, create a snapshot, wait 60 seconds, list snapshots, delete each old snapshot, then write a line to a log file on a file server.
730 words, about 4 min5An Alert That Nobody Receives and a Project Nobody Can See
A Prism Central instance monitors 320 VMs across three clusters. The operations team reports that no email alerts have arrived for two days, although the Prism Central alert dashboard shows 27 open alerts, including six critical 'cluster disk usage' alerts.
724 words, about 4 min